Linking to self in turbogears

I want to put in my master.kid some icons that allow to change the current language for the session.

First, all user-accessible methods need to handle a 'language' parameter:

@expose(template="myapp.templates.foobar")
def index(self, someparam, **kw):
    if 'language' in kw: turbogears.i18n.set_session_locale(kw['language'])

Then, we need a way to edit the current URL so that we can generate modified links to self that preserve the existing path_info and query parameters. In your main controller, add:

def linkself(**kw):
    params = {}
    params.update(cherrypy.request.params)
    params.update(kw)
    url = cherrypy.request.browser_url.split('?', 1)[0]
    return url + '?' + '&'.join(['='.join(x) for x in params.iteritems()])

def add_custom_stdvars(vars):
    return vars.update({"linkself": linkself})

turbogears.view.variable_providers.append(add_custom_stdvars)

(see the turbogears stdvars documentation and the cherrypy request documentation (cherrypy 2 documentation at the bottom of the page))

And finally, in master.kid:

<div id="footer">
  <div id="langselector">
    <span class="language">
      <a href="${tg.linkself(language='it_IT')}">
        <img src="${tg.url('/static/images/it.png')}"/>
      </a>
    </span>

    <span class="language">
      <a href="${tg.linkself(language='C')}">
        <img src="${tg.url('/static/images/en.png')}"/>
      </a>
    </span>
  </div><!-- langselector -->
</div><!-- footer -->

TurboGears RemoteForm tip

In case your RemoteForm misteriously behaves like a normal HTTP form, refreshing the page on submit, and the only hint that there's something wrong is this bit in the Iceweasel's error console:

Errore: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure
code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"
nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)"  location: "JS frame ::
javascript: eval(__firebugTemp__); :: anonymous :: line 1"  data: no]

the problem can just be a missing action= attribute to the form.

I found out after:

1. reading the TurboGears remoteform wiki: "For some reason, the RemoteForm is acting like a regular html form, serving up a new page instead of performing the replacements we're looking for. I'll update this page as soon as I figure out why this is happening."

2. finding this page on Google and meditating for a while while staring at it. I don't speak German, but often enough I manage to solve problems after meditating over Google results in all sorts of languages unknown or unreadable to me. I will call this practice Webomancy.

Python scoping

How do you create a list of similar functions in Python?

As a simple example, let's say we want to create an array of 10 elements like this:

a[0] = lambda x: x
a[1] = lambda x: x+1
a[2] = lambda x: x+2
...
a[9] = lambda x: x+9

Simple:

>>> a = []
>>> for i in range(0,10): a.append(lambda x: x+i)
...

...but wrong:

>>> a[0](1)
10

What happened here? In Python, that lambda x: x+i uses the value that i will have when the function is invoked.

This is the trick to get it right:

>>> a = []
>>> for i in range(0,10): a.append(lambda x, i=i: x + i)
...
>>> a[0](1)
1

What happens here is explained in the section "A Jedi Mind Trick" of the Instant Python article: i=i assigns as the default value of the parameter i the current value of i.

Strangely enough the same article has "A Note About Python 2.1 and Nested Scopes" which seems to imply that from Python 2.2 the scoping has changed to "work as it should". I don't understand: the examples above are run on Python 2.4.4.

Googling for keywords related to python closure scoping only yields various sorts of complicated PEPs and an even uglier list trick:

a lot of people might not know about the trick of using a list to box variables within a closure.

Now I know about the trick, but I wish I didn't need to know

Turbogears quirks when testing controllers that use SingleSelectField

Suppose you have a User that can be a member of a Company. In SQLObject you model it somehow like this:

    class Company(SQLObject):
        name = UnicodeCol(length=16, alternateID=True, alternateMethodName="by_name")
        display_name = UnicodeCol(length=255)

    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')

Then you want to make a form that allows to choose what is the company of a user:

def companies():
    return [ [ -1, 'None' ] ] + [ [c.id, c.display_name] for c in Company.select() ]

class NewUserFields(WidgetsList):
    """Fields for editing general settings"""
    user_name = TextField(label="User name")
    companyID = SingleSelectField(label="Company", options=companies)

Ok. Now you want to run tests:

1. nosetests imports the controller to see if there's any initialisation code.
2. The NewUserFields class is created.
3. The SingleSelectField is created.
4. The SingleSelectField constructor tries to guess the validator and peeks at the first option.
5. This calls companies.
6. companies accesses the database.
7. The testing database has not yet been created because nosetests imported the module before giving the test code a chance to setup the test database.
8. Bang.

The solution is to add an explicit validator to disable this guessing code that is a source of so many troubles:

class NewUserFields(WidgetsList):
    """Fields for editing general settings"""
    user_name = TextField(label="User name")
    companyID = SingleSelectField(label="Company", options=companies, validator=v.Int(not_empty=True))

Turbogears form quirk

I had a great idea:

@validate(model_form)
@error_handler()
@expose(template='kid:myproject.templates.new')
def new(self, id, tg_errors=None, **kw):
    """Create new records in model"""
    if tg_errors:
        # Ask until there is still something missing
        return dict(record = defaults, form = model_form)
    else:
        # We have everything: save it
        i = Item(**kw)
        flash("Item was successfully created.")
        raise redirect("../show/%d" % i.id)

It was perfect: one simple method, simple error handling, nice helpful messages all around. Except, check boxes and select fields would not get the default values while all other fields would.

After two hours searching and cursing and tracing things into widget code, I found this bit in InputWidget.adjust_value:

# there are some input fields that when nothing is checked/selected
# instead of sending a nice name="" are totally missing from
# input_values, this little workaround let's us manage them nicely
# without interfering with other types of fields, we need this to
# keep track of their empty status otherwise if the form is going to be
# redisplayed for some errors they end up to use their defaults values
# instead of being empty since FE doesn't validate a failing Schema.
# posterity note: this is also why we need if_missing=None in
# validators.Schema, see ticket #696.

So, what is happening here is that since check boxes and option fields don't have a nice behaviour when unselected, turbogears has to work around it. So in order to detect the difference between "I selected 'None'" and "I didn't select anything", it reasons that if the input has been validated, then the user has made some selections, so it defaults to "The user selected 'None'". If the input has not been validated, then we're showing the form for the first time, then a missing value means "Use the default provided".

Since I was doing the validation all the time, this meant that Checkboxes and Select fields would never use the default values.

Hence, if you use those fields then you necessarily need two different controller methods, one to present the form and one to save it:

@expose(template='kid:myproject.templates.new')
def new(self, id, **kw):
    """Create new records in model"""
    return dict(record = defaults(), form = model_form)

@validate(model_form)
@error_handler(new)
@expose()
def savenew(self, id, **kw):
    """Create new records in model"""
    i = Item(**kw)
    flash("Item was successfully created.")
    raise redirect("../show/%d"%i.id)

If someone else stumbles on the same problem, I hope they'll find this post and they won't have to spend another two awful hours tracking it down again.

Passing values to turbogears widgets at display time

In turbogears, I often need to pass data to widgets at display time. Sometimes it works automatically, but sometimes, in cases like passing option lists to CheckBoxLists or number of repetitions in a RepeatingFieldSet, it doesn't.

All the examples use precomputed lists or pass simple code functions. In most of my cases, I want them computed by the controller every time.

Passing a function hasn't worked, as I did not find any obvious way to have the function know about the controller.

So I need to pass things the display() method of the widgets, but I could not work out how to pass the option list and default list for a CheckBoxList that is part of a WidgetsList in a TableForm.

On IRC came the answer, thanks to Xentac:

you should be able to...
    tableform.display(options=dict(checkboxname=[optionlist]))

And yes, it works. I can pass the default value as one of the normal form values:

    tableform.display(values=dict(checkboxname=[values]), options=dict(checkboxname=[optionlist]))

File downloads with TurboGears

In TurboGears, I had to implement a file download method, but the file required access controls so it was put in a directory not exported by Apache.

In #turbogears I've been pointed at: http://cherrypy.org/wiki/FileDownload and this is everything put together:

from cherrypy.lib.cptools import serveFile
# In cherrypy 3 it should be:
#from cherrypy.lib.static import serve_file

@expose()
def get(self, *args, **kw):
    """Access the file pointed by the given path"""
    pathname = check_auth_and_compute_pathname()
    return serveFile(pathname)

Then I needed to export some CSV:

@expose()
def getcsv(self, *args, **kw):
    """Get the data in CSV format"""
    rows = compute_data_rows()
    headers = compute_headers(rows)
    filename = compute_file_name()

    cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Type'] = "application/x-download"
    cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="'+filename+'"'

    csvdata = StringIO.StringIO()
    writer = csv.writer(csvdata)
    writer.writerow(headers)
    writer.writerows(rows)

    return csvdata.getvalue()

In my case it's not an issue as I can only compute the headers after I computed all the data, but I still have to find out how to serve the CSV file while I'm generating it, instead of storing it all into a big string and returning the big string.

Turbogears i18n quirks

Collecting strings from .kid files

tg-admin i18n collect won't collect strings from your .kid files: you need the toolbox web interface for that.

Indentation problems in .kid files

The toolbox web interface chokes on intentation errors on your .kid files.

To see the name of the .kid file that causes the error, look at the tg-admin toolbox output in the terminal for lines like Working on app/Foo/templates/bar.kid.

What happens is that the .kid files are converted to python files, and if there are indentation glitches they end up in the python files, and python will complain.

Once you see from the tg-admin toolbox standard error what is the .kid file with the problem, edit it and try to make sure that all closing tags are at the exact indentation level as their coresponding opening tags. Even a single space would matter.

Bad i18n bug in TurboKid versions earlier than 1.0.1

faide on #turbogears also says:

It is of outmost importance that you use TurboKid 1.0.1 because it is the first version that corrects a BIG bug regarding i18n filters ...

The version below had a bug where the filters kept being added at each page load in such a way that after a few hundreds of pages you could have page loading times as long as 5 minutes!

If one has a previous version of TurboKid, one (and only one) of these is needed:

• Patch Kid with the patch at http://www.kid-templating.org/trac/ticket/203
• Patch TurboKid with the patch at http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301
• Upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2, which also works like a charm with python 2.5, which is a performance boost.

So, in short, all i18n users should upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2 or patch TurboKid using http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301.

Quirks when overriding SQLObject setters

Let's suppose you have a User that is, optionally, a member of a Company. In SQLObject you model it somehow like this:

    class Company(SQLObject):
        name = UnicodeCol(length=16, alternateID=True, alternateMethodName="by_name")
        display_name = UnicodeCol(length=255)

    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')

Then you want to implement a user settings interface that uses a Select box to choose the company of the user.

For the Select widget to properly handle the validator for your data, you need to put a number in the first option. As my first option, I want to have the "None" entry, so I decided to use -1 to mean "None".

Now, to make it all blend nicely, I overrode the company setter to accept -1 and silently convert it to a None:

    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')

        def _set_company(self, id):
            "Set the company id, using None if -1 is given"
            if id == -1: id = None
            self._SO_set_company(id)

In the controller, after parsing and validating all the various keyword arguments, I do something like this:

            user.set(**kw)

Now, the overridden method didn't get called.

After some investigation, and with the help of NandoFlorestan on IRC, we figured out the following things:

1. That method needs to be rewritten as _set_companyID:

           def _set_companyID(self, id):
               "Set the company id, using None if -1 is given"
               if id == -1: id = None
               self._SO_set_companyID(id)
   
   

2. Methods overridden in that way are alsop called by user.set(**kw), but not by the User(**kw) constructor, so using, for example, a similar override to transparently encrypt passwords would give you plaintext passwords for new users and encrypted passwords after they changed it.